Surgical ligating clips are well known in the surgical arts. The surgical ligating clips are used in surgical procedures to clip and secure various types of blood vessels. The clips are applied with conventional clip appliers. In such clip appliers, a clip is maintained between a pair of jaws which are actuated to cause the clip to be formed about a blood vessel. Conventional clip appliers can be classified as single clip appliers wherein a clip must be manually loaded into the jaws from a separate clip holding cartridge prior to each use, or multiple clip appliers wherein a clip is automatically or semiautomatically loaded into the jaws from an integral magazine prior to each use.
In order to facilitate the use of a single clip applier, manufacturers have typically packaged ligating clips in cartridges which facilitate the loading of the clips into the jaws of a clip applier. A cartridge will typically consists of a base and a cover. A plurality of clips, e.g., six, is typically contained in the cartridge in separated cavities. A clip is loaded from the cartridge into the jaws of the clip applier by inserting the jaws into an opening contained within the cover and into an underlying cavity containing a clip. A ligating clip is then typically secured within the jaws by interlocking mechanical engagement projections on the clip and the inner surfaces of the jaws.
Ligating clip cartridges have been conventionally loaded by hand. Each ligating clip is manually loaded into an individual cavity within the cartridge. It can be appreciated that manually loading a cartridge with ligating clips is a costly, tedious and time consuming procedure. In addition, the nature of such a procedure can result in inadvertent operator error wherein the operator fails to insert a clip in each cavity of the cartridge. Therefore, what is needed in this art is an apparatus to automatically load ligating clips into ligating clip cartridges.